Spanish Golden Age Theater & Overseas Empire

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course takes students to the theater - literally, to see shows at Madrid's most celebrated venues, and imaginatively, as we read, study, and occasionally improvise performances. The famous period of cultural flourishing known as Spain's Golden Age (ca.1580-1700) followed over a century of Iberian trade, conquest, and plunder overseas. Students in this course will develop critical perspectives on this period and its legacy by reading its most emblematic dramas alongside lesser-known plays that its most famous playwrights composed about Spanish imperial expansion. Special attention will be paid to how they intervened in contentious debates surrounding Iberian conquest, colonization, and evangelization. The course will consider theatrical practice in Castile as well as Portuguese court dramas; dramaturges in the Americas who arguably surpassed their metropolitan counterparts; and translations and adaptations of Golden Age drama into the Indigenous languages of Nahuatl and Quechua. Playwrights may include Lope de Vega Carpio, Ana Caro de Mallen, Tirso de Molina, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and Don Bartolome de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. Taught in Spanish. Students in this course should have already completed or be concurrently enrolled in SPANLANG 13C, or else have an equivalent level of Spanish